Inside My DNA
The first time I submitted my DNA for analysis, it was as a participant in The Genographic Project, a genetic anthropological study run by the National Geographic Society and IBM. The Project sought to map historical human migrations by compiling genetic samples from around the world. It began in 2005 but my wife and I didn’t participate until the final wave, Geno 2.0 Next Generation, in 2016. By the time the Project concluded in 2019, over a million DNA samples from more than 140 countries had been submitted.
Up to that point, my wife and I had never considered DNA testing through commercial companies, concerned over how the information might ultimately be used. And perhaps what might be revealed (did we really want to know that certain devastating diseases ran wild in our families?). But we felt safe putting ourselves in the hands of National Geographic. They had privacy safeguards and didn’t seem likely to sell our data to some sinister political/corporate interest or foreign government.
The results were virtually the same for each of us, and more an affirmation than a revelation. Sophisticated scientific analysis confirmed that, as anyone would have guessed, we were white human beings. The map they provided, along with some very impressive data visualizations, traced my DNA’s journey with a sweeping curving line from what is now called the Caucasian Mountains 10,000 or so years ago, that then flowed across Europe and the Atlantic to somewhere comfortably within North America, with no lingering stops along the way. I’m not sure why I thought I’d get something more specific. It’s National Geographic. They’re thinking species, not countries, millennia not centuries, evolution not changes of address.
The other takeaway is that the results, while not confirming anything definitively, certainly didn’t put away the overall questions I was now looking to answer: when did my ancestors come to America and from where? And with that, a more specific question:
Am I — at least in part — Jewish?
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“Are you Jewish?”
That may seem to have come from out of nowhere. It struck me the same way the first time (of many) it was asked of me.
I was sitting alone in a corner of the cafeteria at NYU. This was the summer of 1986 and I’d come to the city to be in the school’s Summer Publishing Institute, a six-week introduction to both the book and magazine sides of the business, where you meet professionals doing all kinds of jobs for all kinds of publishers. The fee for the course included housing at an NYU dorm (mine was just west of Washington Square) and access to university facilities, including the cafeteria. Between the amped-up energy of the city and the quality of the food, I lost around 25 pounds in that summer.
There were two of them, and they were facing me but not entrapping me in that corner. You can tell the difference. They wore black suits and white shirts, and broad-brimmed black fedoras. Smiling, friendly, casual. They seemed a little younger than me, but that would make sense. I’d been out of college three years before signing up for the summer class.
I responded that I wasn’t Jewish and had the instinct not to add, “So far as I know.” I too was smiling, friendly, casual. I didn’t act surprised at being asked, didn’t laugh like I thought the answer was obvious, didn’t act put out for having my breakfast interrupted. I didn’t ask them why they thought I might be Jewish. Appearance, demeanor? It wasn’t as if my plate was pork-free or that I was reading Herzog.
They said thanks and have a nice day and stepped back to look around the room, to see if there was another likely prospect.
Soon after, I called home to mom from one of the wooden telephone booths in my dorm lobby. At a point when I was running out of things to say but hadn’t been on the phone long enough, I mentioned the encounter. Her response caught me by surprise.
“Well, you’re Uncle Gene used to always say you were.”
What?
Uncle Geno? The family’s favorite funnyman? Who had the motorcycle I wasn’t supposed to be on, the El Camino I wasn’t supposed to ride in the back of? Who’d been my drinking buddy since I started college and was one of the last people to whom I said goodbye before I flew to New York?
He’d never said a word about this to me.
As mom then reminded me, my dad’s grandfather was Charles Gold. Geno used to say that at some point in the family history, “Gold’ had been either Goldberg or Goldstein. And that someone many generations back decided to mask the family’s Jewish origins when they came to North America then headed west to the prairie.
But when it became clear that I considered this news that changes everything, and asked if there was any proof of this, mom said, “Oh, he just did that to infuriate Joanne (his and my dad’s older sister).”
Now that sounded just like him.
Geno was still alive at that time. He died in 1990. I never made a trip back to Oklahoma without a margarita-fueled hangout with him at The Border Crossing in Norman. I did ask him once about what this whole Jewish thing was about and got a chuckle and a grin back that was equal parts confession and curtain call.
But knowing Geno was just being a stinker didn’t entirely put the question to rest. Throughout that first summer and my first months in New York, as I met more Jewish people, as I racked up numerous invitations to step into a Mitzvah Tank, and as I put the weight back on, I started to see why someone might think it possible.
I wasn’t afraid of the answer being yes, like Aunt Joanne. I wasn’t feeling like there was something missing in my life that this would explain. Lord knows, I had no idea what I’d do if I learned there was any kind of significant, previously obscured Jewish heritage in the family. It’s not like you can just suddenly become Jewish (or a member of any other cultural tradition) even if you discover you always had been.
So that encounter in the NYU cafeteria wasn’t the start of some relentless, multi-decade obsession with finding the essence of my true self. It was simply something I thought about every now and then.
I got what I thought would be a put-it-to-rest answer with my next, most recent, and likely final involvement with genetic testing.
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We still get a Christmas tree. A smaller one now. We no longer need a six-footer with plenty of room under the lowest branches for presents. The days of Christmas wishlists, of family members lavishing packaged gifts on the grandchild/nephew, are over. My wife and I don’t get anything for each other, and by Christmas morning, whatever we’re doing for our son has long been determined and he’s probably already worn it, or used the tickets, or loaded up his Amazon cart. We still exchange actual physical gifts with our one family member in New York City, an older gentleman. But those gifts fit just fine under a four-footer sitting on an end table by the sofa. Other than those, it’s envelopes with gift cards riding on branches among the lights and ornaments.
But there was a surprise under the tree on a recent Christmas morning — two packages wrapped in different paper but identical in size and shape, one addressed to my son and one to me. If there’d just been one of them, mine, I’d have thought it was a book, but it was obvious that we were each a version of the same thing, and he isn’t a reader.
He was as mystified as I was. An actual, unexpected, no-idea-what-it-is gift! And something that connected father and son! We did the one-two-three count and opened them at the same time.
My wife had gotten each of us sample kits from 23 and Me.
I was ecstatic! And was genuinely surprised that my wife was the giftgiver. I didn’t think she would ever trust any commercial interest with a DNA sample, hers or ours. Then I realized she hadn’t gotten one for herself. Her reason was that she knew where her family came from — one part from Ireland, one part from Lithuania. She even knew when the core group of brothers and sisters and cousins from Lithuania came to America. It was in the early 1920s, actually through Ellis Island, with a big name change to something easier to spell. Grimalauskas became Grimm. Or in an alternative spelling, Grimn.
Suddenly, it was like Christmases of old. But instead of assembling something new for Charles, he and I went to work putting the sample collection pieces together, and started summoning enough spit to satisfy the requirements for testing. We each registered online that afternoon, and the resealed boxes with the samples properly stored went out in the mail the next morning.
The results came back well within the estimated response time. And I took a moment before opening mine. Because I was about to find out who I always was.
And it turns out — according to science — I’m…
1% Finnish. Okay. I can’t say I saw that coming.
And…
98% from Ireland and northern England, meaning the Liverpool/Manchester/Newcastle area. Well, that made all the sense in the world to me. The Beatles! The Pogues! Joyce! Pubs! English and Irish breakfasts! Man City! I was not only drawn to these things as a matter of good taste but through innate biological imperative. No wonder I felt so at home on our trips to Ireland, especially the one to the West. I was home!
The remaining one percent was divided between French and German and some others.
Which I took to mean I was exactly…
Zero percent Jewish.
As in none. Not one bit.
I know you can be Jewish in Ireland or England, or Finland for that matter, and that anyone can adopt the Jewish faith and traditions, but there was nothing in my DNA linking me to the ancient homeland, pre-diaspora. The possibility of having even a tiny drop of Jewish blood in me had been resoundingly refuted by…a Christmas present. I suppose I could belabor that.
I’ll confess it was a letdown. I was all set to take in the evidence that I was at least a certain percentage Jewish, a different person than I thought I was.
On the other hand, look at me! I’m officially Irish and Northern English, and that news required absolutely no reconsideration of my life at all. So what if my DNA held no surprises (except for, you know, Finland). If I didn’t have any particularly exotic stuff lurking in the coils, at least I now knew I was something.
As for my son, 23 and Me reported that he was about three-quarters from Ireland/Northern England and one-quarter from — yes — Eastern Europe! Meaning Lithuania! He was exactly one-half me and one-half my wife. He even had a microdose of Finnish in him.
Our results were a clear verification of what we already knew about my wife’s family, and thus validated her decision to forego a test for herself. But, surprise again, she then decided to order one of her own — and was disappointed at the response to her submission from 23 and Me. It wasn’t that her results were distressing or contradicted anything. It was that her test couldn’t be run at all. It seems she’d provided an insufficient quantity of spit.
They sent her a replacement kit. She hasn’t opened it.
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So that’s it then. My European roots uncovered — overwhelmingly Ireland and Northern England. The “where” was resolved. That just leaves who, when, and why.